People are spending a lot of time watching cat videos and Facetiming with friends.
Around the world people will spend 492 minutes -- or more than eight hours a day -- consuming
media this year, up 1.4% from 485 minutes a day in 2014, according to ZenithOptimedia’s (ZO) Media Consumption Forecasts.
This increase will be driven by the rapid growth in Internet use,
which will increase by 11.8%.
“The average person already spends half their waking life consuming media,” said Jonathan Barnard, ZenithOptimedia’s (ZO) Head of Forecasting.
“But people around the world are clearly hungry for even more opportunities to discover information, enjoy entertainment and communicate with each other, and new technology is supplying these
opportunities.
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"Technology also enables brands to communicate with and learn from consumers in new ways. We expect media consumption to continue to grow for the foreseeable future, multiplying
the opportunities for brands to develop relationships with consumers,” he adds.
Global media consumption increased from an average of 461.8 minutes a day in 2010 to 485.3 minutes a day
in 2014, an increase of 5.1%, or an average of 1.2% a year. Media consumption is highest in Latin America, where people spent an average of 744 minutes consuming media in 2014, and lowest in
Asia-Pacific, where consumption averaged just 301 minutes that year.
Time spent in front of screens continues to evolve over the years. Television remains by far the most
popular screen option, generating 183.9 minutes of consumption a day in 2014. Television accounted for 42.4% of global media consumption in 2010, and 37.9% in 2014. ZO says it will still account
for more than a third (34.7%) by 2017.
Still, ZO says one big surprise from its report is that TV has been on a consistent global downtrend since 2010, expecting TV to only have
started to decline at about 2013. This shows the value of having hard global data to correct our general impressions, says Barnard.
Internet consumption now ranks second, clocking in with
109.5 minutes per day. Newspapers have suffered the most from competition from the Internet, followed by magazines. Between 2010 and 2014, the average time spent reading newspapers fell by 25.6%,
while time spent reading magazines fell 19.0%. In fact, the consumption of every traditional medium including newspapers, magazines, television, radio and cinema has fallen between 2010 and
2014, directly because of competition from the internet, and ZO expects their decline to continue to 2017.
It's not expected to improve for most of these traditional media. Between 2014 and
2017, ZO expects newspaper consumption to shrink by an average of 4.7% a year, while magazines and TV shrink at average rates of 4.4% and 1.6%, respectively.
However, it is important
to note that these figures only refer to time spent with these media in their traditional forms -- with printed publications and broadcast programs watched on television sets. Any
time that consumers spend with broadcasters’ and publishers’ online brand extensions is included in the Internet total, reports ZO.
Out-of-home media is a bright spot
for advertisers. The amount of time people are exposed to outdoor advertising increased by 1.2% between 2010 and 2014, from 106.0 to 107.2 minutes a day. ZO says this is because there are "more
displays being built in public spaces, migration to cities in emerging markets, and consumers’ greater willingness to spend their leisure time out of the home as their
disposable income recovered after the financial crisis. Between 2014 and 2017 we expect exposure to outdoor advertising to increase by 0.2% a year," says ZO.
Looking forward, ZO
forecasts that between 2014 and 2017, the amount of time spent consuming media around the world will increase by an average 1.4% a year, reaching 506.0 minutes in 2017. Meanwhile, Internet
consumption will grow by 9.8% a year to reach 144.8 minutes a day. The Internet’s share of overall media consumption will rise from 12.9% in 2010 and 22.6% in 2014 to 28.6% in 2017.